Instead of frightened neighing, the horse seemed to utter a bawdy chuckle. A second crossbow went spung! , but such unnatural sounds from a horse put off the archer's aim. The bolt sank deep into a tree well above Gerik's head.
Then Gerik spurred his horse forward, taking the lead, drawing his sword as he did. His body did all that it was trained to do without any commands from his wits, which had their own work. He had planned to dismount and slip the last mile or so to the supplies on foot, but this early fight would mean riding in all the way.
Arrows whistled, horses and men screamed, and suddenly Gerik's left flank was free of mounted enemies. One man was still on his feet, but a kender's bollik sailed out of the darkness and three lead-weighted thongs wrapped the man's legs into a single unsteady support. He toppled over, and a kender tapped him firmly on the jaw so that he stopped moving.
Gerik was relieved to see the kender's mercy. Kender fighting as much as they had in defense of Tirabot Manor was unusual in itself. Kender turning bloodthirsty would unsettle the mind of Paladine himself!
To Gerik's right, the enemy patrol was riding or running off down the nearest path. The Shorn One raised his staff and fire flared at its tip. The fire took flight, a ball the size of a kender's fist, racing down the path after the fugitives. Gerik's stomach churned, as he took back his thoughts about kender and blood.
Instead of scything down the fleeing enemies, however, the fireball bounced off a tree, hit the ground, bounced again to hit a branch beyond the men, bounced yet one more time to strike a very high branch and plunge vertically among the men, to bounce and emerge again-
The fugitives stopped, as if the fireball was weaving a cage of iron bars around them.
"That will halt them and dazzle them," the Shorn One said, breaking his silence for the first time. "Now we must ride on swiftly, so that the guards will only be frightened, not alert, when we come.
"Oh, I almost forgot. Those fellows must not hear us ride off, either." The Shorn One raised his staff again, this time pointing it at the kender who was retrieving his hoopak.
The hoopak leaped into the air and sailed off the same way as the fireball, so fast that its owner nearly went with it. He threw a black look at the Shorn One, which faded to a frown, and that turned into a smile as he saw his hoopak begin to whirl in the air, just short of where the bouncing fireball still wove its cage around the men.
A hoopak whirled by ordinary kender muscles was a formidable bull-roarer. This magic-driven one filled the night and the forest with a cry like a city of minotaurs gone mad. Gerik turned his horse, but let Bertsa Wylum and one of her scouts take the lead, for they knew the rest of the way better than he did. Then he spurred his mount to keep up with them.
It was, he decided, just as well that kender did not add bloodlust to their ingenuity. Then even the minotaurs and the Silvanesti might find that they had other rivals than the human ones, for the mastery of Krynn.
Chapter 18
There wasn't room on the trail for all the riders to outpace the warning the fight with the patrol had given. So Bertsa Wylum picked six riders who knew the ground and told them to cut across country.
"Get close enough to let the sentries see you, then retreat to draw them off," she said. "When you've lost them, cut through the woods to the Mine Road. We'll retreat that way and pick you up as we come."
Gerik signaled to Wylum to ride close.
"They'll have a better chance with you leading them," he said, "and you won't miss any of the serious fighting."
"I might miss sell-swords who will listen to me."
"You might also find them more easily," Gerik said. "You certainly won't find me complaining about being left alone."
"I might find your parents having a word or two on the matter."
"When they return, and find out, and we are all alive to hear what they say, then you can worry."
Wylum's smile told Gerik how much desire and duty had been clashing. She turned her mount, fell in at the rear of the six, but had worked her way up to the head before icy vanished in the darkness.
Left alone at the head of twelve humans and six kender, Gerik ordered everyone to rein back to a trot. The ground here was well drained; it was soft from the rain, rather than muddy. Wet branches still slapped faces, and in distance they could hear the enspelled hoopak still bellowing.
If Gerik had allowed himself to fear getting lost, that fear would have ended moments later. From ahead the shouts of fifty men and the clashing of twice that many weapons burst through the trees.
Gerik heard soft laughter behind him. Without turning he muttered, "Your doing?"
"A simple, quick illusion spell," the Shorn One chuckled. "There's another camp between us and the supplies, but it should be empty before we come through it. Nobody will be hurt, though. Not unless they are too careless to have any right to name themselves-sell-swords."
The camp lay barely half a mile farther down the trail. It was indeed empty of human life when Gerik led his people into the clearing, but not for long. As he signaled for a new advance, a pack train came out of the trees on the far side of the clearing, harness jingling and creaking and guards prodding their mules and horses with cracking whips and shouts.
Indeed, they were so intent on their work that it was moment before they realized that the camp was empty. By then, Gerik had spread out his riders and ordered the charge.
Enemy riders appeared as the charge went home and Gerik's fighters sliced through the pack train in half a dozen places. Gerik himself suddenly found that he was fighting two mounted swordsmen, while a man on foot with a spear tried to get between the swordsmen and join the fight.
It was Gerik's first time at real heavy cavalry fighting, a thought that lingered in his mind for all of about two heartbeats. After that he was too busy parrying and slashing, wishing he had a shield, and hoping that the spearman would be trampled by one of his own allies before he could bring down Gerik's mount.
Tonight, he had warned his people, they might not have the luxury of bringing out their wounded. He hoped none would sacrifice themselves trying to make an exception for him.
One of Gerik's people rode up behind one enemy and cut him out of the saddle. An arrow took the second's mount, and Gerik slashed down as the man leaped clear, cutting through helm and skull both.
The spearman was now close enough to thrust, but again kender bollik came to Gerik's rescue. This time the thongs wrapped themselves around the spear, jerking it aside from its deadly line to the chest of Gerik's mount. The spearman stumbled, and Gerik's mounted comrade slashed the man across the back of the neck, between helmet and backplate.
That was as much detail of the fight as Gerik remembered. For the next few minutes it dissolved into a chaos of sword strokes ringing on armor or sinking through into flesh and bone, war cries, death cries, a hundred animals neighing and screaming, some of them trampling the fallen…
The first thing Gerik noticed afterward was kender on foot, busily exploring the packs of the fallen animals and the pockets of the dead enemies. It was an odd sort of relief to see kender indulging their usual curiosity about anything left unclaimed or even merely unattended.
The Shorn One stormed at his people in language that Gerik did not understand but doubted would bear translation, at least in polite company. Gerik counted empty saddles, and discovered that his band was down another two fighters. But torches gleamed through the trees, and beyond them Gerik saw the looming bulk of the tent. The pack train must have been the first issue of supplies to the men in the camp routed by the Shorn One's illusion spell.